Biglaw's Summer Associate Recruitment Cycle Is The Worst Since The Great Recession
With a mismatch between talent and legal needs, things are getting a little tricky for law students hoping to work in Biglaw.
‘Please let me get this job!’
With Biglaw firms pulling back in the race for new talent, student recruitment for summer associate programs has hit a bit of a slump. In fact, according to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), this was the most underwhelming recruiting cycle since the Great Recession. Yikes.
According to the latest recruiting figures from NALP, offer rates for Biglaw summer programs decreased by 19% compared to the last summer’s hiring program. On top of that, just 46% of callback interviews resulted in offers for summer 2024 positions (down six percentage points from last year), which is the lowest offer rate since 2012. With fewer offers on the table, desperation was thick in the air, and it translated to an acceptance rate to those offers of 47% (up six percentage points from last year) — the highest acceptance rate NALP has ever recorded.
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None of this is good news for law students looking for a job in the face of a job market that’s likely to be “challenging.” As noted by Reuters, Nikia L. Gray, NALP’s executive director, wrote in the report that “[f]irms may have growing concerns about absorbing additional new talent if client demand does not increase to keep pace and they continue to carry excess capacity through 2024.”
Enough of the doom and gloom, let’s talk about what happened with 2023’s summer associates. According to NALP, offer rates for Biglaw summer programs remained close to historic highs, with 96% of second-year law students receiving offers for full-time employment as associates after graduation (though it should be noted that his is the lowest offer rate since 2017). Acceptances of those offers matched last year’s all-time high of 89%. That’s all great news, but we can’t help but to wonder if these incoming associates aren’t a little bit worried about their futures given the measures firms took to rightsize recruitment due to excess capacity.
Nevertheless, congratulations to all law students who went through the entry-level recruitment cycle in 2023. We hope that everything works out.
Drop in Demand for New Talent at Law Firms Results in Softest Recruiting Cycle since the Great Recession [NALP]
Law firm summer associate recruiting hits 11-year low in 2023 [Reuters]
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Earlier: Biglaw’s Summer Associate Recruitment Cycle Has Taken A Dip Amid Layoffs And Fears Of A Recession
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.
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